Health Icons Lecture Series: Gary Taubes

Health Icons Lecture Series: Gary Taubes

For the past half a century, the concept of a healthy diet has been synonymous with a diet low in fat, and particularly low in what is all-too-often referred to as “artery-clogging” saturated fat, the fat found in quantity in eggs, butter, meat and dairy products. The result has been a national dietary prescription to eat ever more plant-based diets: copious fruits, green vegetables and whole grains ,while we minimize our consumption of animal products. For those of us who are overweight or ...

For the past half a century, the concept of a healthy diet has been synonymous with a diet low in fat, and particularly low in what is all-too-often referred to as “artery-clogging” saturated fat, the fat found in quantity in eggs, butter, meat and dairy products. The result has been a national dietary prescription to eat ever more plant-based diets: copious fruits, green vegetables and whole grains ,while we minimize our consumption of animal products. For those of us who are overweight or obese, this advice has been accompanied by the insistence that we got that way merely by eating “too much” and that the only way to solve our problems is to eat less and exercise more. And yet this now ubiquitous dietary advice has coincided with unprecedented increases in the prevalence of obesity and diabetes, raising the obvious question of whether this advice and the belief system associated with it may somehow be to blame. Are they based on sound science? And if they’re not, which the evidence strongly suggests, then how did we come to believe them and why? And, perhaps most important, what’s the alternative? Why do we get fat and diabetic, and what can we do about it?

By asking these questions for the past 20 years, Gary Taubes has become perhaps the single most influential journalist covering nutrition and health today. He’s certainly the most controversial. His investigative reporting on the science of nutrition and the dietary triggers of obesity and diabetes are fundamentally changing the way we eat and live. Michael Pollan has described him as the closest thing we have to a “scientific Alexksandr Solzhenitsyn,” exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of current nutrition science. The Atlantic recently described his investigative journalism as so tenacious and obsessive that he had “fallen through a wormhole from reporting into expertise.”

Taubes’s skeptical, rigorously scientific approach to nutrition science is unparalleled and now he wants to share both the approach and the implications to our health and how to eat to remain healthy.

Use the discount code "presale-taubes" to save 20% off the ticket price — discount expires on 15 August (not applicable to the dinner event)